Verizon acquires autonomous threat detection startup Niddel

Verizon (which owns this publication) announced today that it has acquired Niddel, a startup that bills itself as an autonomous threat detection service. The acquisition price was not disclosed.

Niddel’s primary product, Niddel Magnet is a subscription service that uses machine learning to locate infected or compromised machines inside an organization. It works completely autonomously and doesn’t require customers to generate their own code, rules, searches or even any kind of content.

“Using machine learning to improve information accuracy significantly reduces false positives and significantly improves our detection and response capabilities,” Alexander Schlager, Verizon’s executive director for security services explained in a statement. Those capabilities were one of the primary reasons the company made the acquisition.

Reducing those false positives is a big goal of the Niddel solution, especially in light of the shortage of qualified security analysts to help monitor these kinds of systems. “[Niddel Magnet] eliminates up to 96% of false positives, compared to traditional indicator-based threat hunting techniques. On average 40% of alerts represent novel threats identified by our patented supervised machine learning models’ extrapolation of existing threat knowledge,” the company wrote on its website.

Niddel uses a variety of information from over 50 internal and external sources to track the kinds of security threats that could be affecting machines in customer organizations. In a time when companies are growing increasingly concerned about compromised machines, it purports to provide a completely automated solution, no longer requiring finding qualified analysts, something that is a huge challenge for companies.

Niddel was founded in 2014. Verizon plans to incorporate Niddel’s technology into Verizon solutions in the coming months.